Perspective

Book Review

Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali (2007) Free Press, New York, USA, pp. 353.

In this book, one finds Mecca but not Medina. This autobiography has the author finding the elementary Judao Christianity of real Mohammed, and she is able to break free from the post-Mecca deformation of Islam by power mad families who turned the Koran into the greatest satanic monster-creating anti-human treatise on earth. I believe she confirms my thesis that there will never be peace with Islam until Islam returns to its genuine origins where there are no satanic verses and no possibility for power mad mullahs to create shrieking monsters eager to beat their wives, abuse their children and kill others who do not agree with them.

Ali traces her childhood in Somalia to the United States, being truly saved by many fortuitous events and her own intelligence and perseverance in the subliminal shards of Judao Christianity hidden in contemporary Islam. The author is an admirable woman. The world needs a million, rather ten million of her!

Every Islamic value I had been taught instructed me to put myself last. Life on earth is a test, and if you manage to put yourself last in this life, you are serving Allah; your place will be first in the Hereafter. The more deeply you submit your will, the more virtuous that makes you. But...everyone else in Holland seemed to think that it was natural to seek one’s own personal happiness on earth in the here and now (Pg. 219).

She makes clear that for Muslims, especially women, as Allah wills it, one is to be abused, beaten, circumcised, treated grotesquely and unable to tolerate any deviation from “Islam norms” (which is the purest proof of actual inferiority one could ever observe). In Islam, everyone is shamed into doing so by an Islamic “code of honor” which is nothing more than intimidation by using the Koran as a bludgeon. But Ali also had “another kind of education – an education in suffering, abuse, pain, misery, and the evils of ignorance” (Pg. 242-43) in referring to her Islamic background.

[I]t (intolerance) was systemic in Islam, because this was a religion that had never gone through a process of Enlightenment that would lead people to question its rigid approach to individual freedom. Moreover, I wrote, Islam didn’t oppose only the right of homosexuals to live undisturbed. Anyone who had been to an abortion clinic or a women’s center could readily see that the sexual morals of Islam could only lead to suffering (Pg. 266-67).

Ali laments the naivete of the West’s bland protection of violent Muslims, especially the Dutch:

The Dutch had forgotten that it was possible for people to stand up and wage war, destroy property, imprison, kill, impose laws of virtue because of the call of God. That kind of religion had not been present in Holland for centuries (Pg. 269).

She calls the acceptance of the reasons of those responsible for September 11th Twin Towers destruction and all Islamic terrorism to be nothing but:

Infuriatingly stupid analysts – especially people who call themselves Arabists, yet who seem to know next to nothing about the reality of the Islamic world – wrote Reams of commentary. The articles were all about Islam saving Aristotle and the zero, which medieval Muslim scholars had done more than eight hundred years ago; about Islam being a religion of peace and tolerance, not the slightest bit violent. These were fairy tales, nothing to do with the real world I knew. (Pg. 270).

Further comments are worthy of repeating:

I explained that Islam was like a mental cage. At first when you opened the door, the caged bird stays inside: it is frightened. It has internalized its imprisonment. It takes time for the bird to escape, even after someone has opened the doors to its cage.

(Pg. 285-86)...

Wishful thinking about the peaceful tolerance of Islam cannot interpret away this reality; hands are still cut off, women are still stoned and enslaved, just as the prophet Mohammed decided centuries ago (Pg. 347).

The message of this book, if it must have a message, is that we in the West would be wrong to prolong the pain of that transition unnecessarily, by elevating cultures full of bigotry and hatred toward women to the stature of respectable alternative ways of life (Pg. 348).

Sister Aziza (her Islamic teacher as a child) used to warn us of the decadence of the West: the corrupt, licentious perverted, idolatrous, money-grubbing, souless countries of Europe. But to me, there is far worse moral corruption in Islamic countries. In those societies, cruelty is implacable and inequality is the law of the land. Dissidents are tortured, women are policed both by the state and their families to whom the state gives the power to rule their lives (Pg. 349-350).

She makes clear the psychological defensiveness of Muslims who “weren’t integrated into Dutch society” (Pg. 223): Such Muslims maintain a fantasy of know-it-all, better than white people, clinging to the ruined Koran which has destroyed their own countries from which they fled (70% of the world’s refugees are Muslims). They cling to a “code of honor” which is really a code of self-serving lies based on the Koran as malignantly deformed after Mecca to control them.

This book gives the truth as this woman his lived it. Well worth reading and reflecting upon. It gives insights which one will never get from brain-dead robotile Islamic promoters who will, in the final analysis, have to shriek and threaten to get you to agree with them, because they believe in the post-Meccan false Koran and false Prophet, i.e., infidels in the truest sense meaning those who intentionally undermine faith and trust in God, his signs, and revelations.